What does it mean to be human? Henrich’s book, a pleasure for the biologically and scientifically inclined, doesn’t provide...
As Henrich (Evolutionary Biology/Harvard Univ.; co-author: Why Humans Cooperate, 2007, etc.) notes, we humans are big-brained but not big enough, for “our kind are not that bright, at least not innately smart enough to explain the immense success of our species.”
A glance at the TV would bear out that idea, but the author means the observation as a prelude to a larger construct: individually, we harbor all sorts of weaknesses, from shortness of step to smallness of thought, but collectively, we are capable of arriving at solutions to problems that would elude any single one of us. Just so, he observes in an often repeated formula, though by brain size alone we should be able to beat apes in most tasks, in an important study, our “hairy brethren…mostly tied [us] in a wide range of cognitive domains.” Where we excel over other species is in social learning and behavior of related kinds; in another important study, “chimpanzees and capuchins revealed zero instances of teaching or altruistic giving,” whereas the human preschoolers the apes were compared to showed all manner of teaching, learning, sharing, and giving. It may not be a Mister Rogers world out there, but Henrich’s point, though belabored, is well-taken. While it is true that, left to their own devices, humans are prey to every fallacy there is, together we manage to think and muddle through. That’s culture, and that’s our advantage as humans. It’s good ammunition for the crowdsourcing advocates among us, though Henrich’s argument is more extensive than that. The writing is sometimes dense but always comprehensible, and it’s refreshing to see someone argue from an unabashedly Darwinian—or post-Darwinian, anyway—point of view without trying to edge away from terms such as “natural selection” and “evolution.”
What does it mean to be human? Henrich’s book, a pleasure for the biologically and scientifically inclined, doesn’t provide the definitive answer, but it does offer plenty of material for a definition.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-691-16685-8
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A tale of science and discovery on the high, frozen seas. In the summer of 1991, Arms (coauthor, Touching the World,1975), a writer and sailor, set out on an ocean voyage to explore the Tourngat region of northern Labrador. His passage was unexpectedly blocked by a huge wall of sea ice ``that should not have been there,'' especially in high summer, and especially in the summer of 1991, one of the warmest years in recent record. His awe and perplexity over this untoward occurrence led him to return to the area three years later to seek the reasons why these North Atlantic ocean passages should be clogged with ice out of season and closed to shipping. In the course of his lively narrative, he never provides a single answer, apart from ``the randomness of nature.'' Instead, he offers a wonderfully rich account of the mechanics of ocean currents and world weather systems, of the migrations of pilot whales and the minds of sailors far from shore. Arms introduces his readers to such notions as the Great Conveyor Belt theory of oceanic water flow, explains why the Atlantic is saltier and warmer than the Pacific, ponders such climatological anomalies as the ``halocline catastrophe,'' and, closest to his quest, considers the latest scientific reasoning on global warmingthe evidence for which phenomenon now appears to be incontrovertible. His science reporting is sound, his eye for meaningful detail sharp. His narrative suffers a bit from long passages of dialogue that go nowhere, but in the end this is a fine study of how complex systems workand how much closure-seeking science is unable to account for. Fans of popular-science writing and Arctic buffs alike will learn much from Arms's adventure. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-49092-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The latest entry into the who-are-we-and- where-did-we-come-from debate is from Tattersall (The Fossil Trail, 1995, etc.), the highly regarded fossil expert and curator of the department of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Mincing no words and keeping the pot of controversy ready to boil over, Tattersall asserts that there is no question that the Neanderthals came to a dead end without heirs. While they coexisted 40,000 years ago with Cro-Magnons, it was the latter who replaced them and are our ancestors. Among his reasons for this assertion are the elegant artworks found in Cro-Magnon cave sites, bespeaking symbolic reasoning; a tool kit that demonstrates a quantum leap in abstract thinking and planning; and the anatomical arrangements that afford speech and therefore languageall absent from Neanderthal remains. However, in his review of the primate and hominid literature, he chooses not to make invidious comparisons (Neanderthals are not ``dumb'' humans) so much as to say that the various species ``played by different sets of rules.'' Human evolution, he says, echoing colleagues Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould, is no linear ascent, but an episodic affair with assorted species coexisting (but presumably not interbreeding) until the emergence of the H. sapiens. We are the end-products of unpredictable climate change, habitual upright posture (which freed our hands), brain growth, and the capacity for speech. But finally we are left with the not very hopeful picture of humanity dominating the globe. Further, we might be end products in another sense: We are so populous that there are no longer the pockets of isolated populations that allow mutations to develop into new species. Tattersall concludes that ``we are stuck with our old familiarand potentially dangerousserves, and we urgently need to learn how best to live with that fact''so that, we might add, we can continue such learned arguments on human origins to the next round.
Pub Date: March 23, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-100340-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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